One To One Food Therapy
~ Do you regularly overeat or binge eat?
~ Would you describe yourself as an emotional eater? Do you turn to food to ‘cope’?
~ Do you tend to eat mindlessly and on ‘autopilot’? Perhaps you enjoy eating healthy meals but you can’t control excessive grazing or snacking?
~ Have you had enough of dieting, but do you still want to lose weight?
~ Do you feel lost in terms of how to approach healthy, balanced eating and/or weight loss?
~ Do you experience a lot of food guilt, and see your eating as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’?
If you want to develop a better relationship with food, feel more in charge of your eating or put an end to yo-yo dieting, you could gain great benefit from having the opportunity and private space to explore and address your current eating habits. Not all the clients I work with want to, or need to, lose weight- some people might want to specifically address overeating or binge eating, improve their overall relationship with food or nutritional knowledge to make more healthy, balanced and satisfying food choices, or tackle a lifetime of disordered eating.
Food and eating can symbolise different things to different people. For example, eating can be a way to relax or have a break. It can have a calming, distracting or numbing effect when things feel difficult or overwhelming; it can be a way to reward oneself, let go or decompress, a way to put things off (procrastinate), and it can even be a means of rebelling or rule-breaking. Food might be used as a way to self-soothe or even self-punish. When looking at our relationship with food, eating habits and body image, it’s also important to look at our past- our childhood can positively or negatively affect, well into adulthood, our relationship with food, our self-concept, our current relationships, our belief systems and general behaviour. It can be really beneficial to look at the whole picture when exploring our relationship with food.
To have a good relationship with food, you need to have a good relationship with yourself. For those with a history of yo-yo dieting, there’s often a self-limiting, rule-bound ‘diet head’ telling you what you should and shouldn’t be eating, and an inner critic that kicks off whenever you eat ‘bad’ food, keeping you trapped in a cycle of guilt and a sense of failure. It’s not you failing at the diet, but the diet failing you, because most diets are restrictive and unsustainable. If you focus on addressing your overall relationship with food, gradual weight loss can be a positive by-product. You need to be patient with yourself as there might be decades of thought patterns and habitual eating behaviours to address, but building self-awareness is a great starting point- once you’ve gained greater self-insight into your eating habits, thought patterns, attitudes and belief systems in relation to food, eating and weight loss, you can then find strategies for positive, long-term change. We’re all different, so we each need a personalised, tailor-made approach.
“I’m thrilled that I’m losing weight and I can’t believe that I can actually lose weight and not hate the process. It’s all thanks to you!”
My one-to-one sessions (face-to-face or online) are for people who are looking for personalised, one-to-one support. The sessions are based on the concepts of mindful eating, and depending on individual client needs they can focus on the psychological (mindset) aspects of your eating (such as emotional eating) or they can focus more on your actual diet, where we might discuss the nutritional components, enabling us to create a realistic, personalised eating plan (meal and snack ideas). The sessions can therefore focus more on mindset, or more on nutrition, or they might address a mixture of the two. Commonly, emotional eating is explored in depth, but we might also do a re-cap on nutrition, if the client is seeking clarity or further information relating to nutrition which could help them to make healthier food choices.
Working together, we’ll explore and identify any current barriers to weight loss, or causes of overeating that could be negatively impacting your eating habits and relationship with food, and identify strategies to help you make some positive changes. We’ll also explore any unhelpful attitudes, beliefs and thought patterns, as well as any unhelpful eating behaviours that may have evolved and ‘stuck’ over time, and help you to find a more flexible, ‘middle-way’ approach. Baby steps is really key, so we’ll go at a pace that’s comfortable and realistic for you.
Flexibility Of Sessions
It is recommended (but not compulsory) that clients attending one-to-one sessions complete a minimum of six sessions (taken weekly or fortnightly)- this is because implementing new eating / lifestyle habits can take time, and clients find that regular contact and support helps to keep them focused and motivated. The number of sessions required will also depend very much on individual needs and preferences.
If clients choose to have ongoing sessions, they have the option of reducing session frequency. For example, they might start off with weekly or fortnightly sessions (most people find fortnightly useful), but further down the line they might choose to see me for ‘check-ins’ once a month, once every 6-8 weeks, or even once every 3-6 months.
From my experience of working with clients, a number of sessions over time is much more effective than just two or three sessions over a short period, as building new, sustainable habits can take time, and we can slip back into old habits. Regular sessions over a few months offer the client a great opportunity to receive ongoing support, develop and consolidate skills and knowledge, maintain motivation and re-visit or ‘tweak’ strategies for any particular challenges they might be facing.
“I was a victim of 1980s dieting”
Booking An Appointment
Initial session (90 minutes): £65
Subsequent sessions (60 minutes): £50
SPECIAL OFFER: Buy three sessions upfront, get a fourth session FREE! You can also pay as you go, or start a batch of sessions at any point.
Session availability: Weekday morning, afternoon and evenings, and some Saturdays.
Payment Options: BACS, cash or cheque.
If you’d like more information about my one-to-one sessions, give me a call (Emma Randall): 07961 423120 or email me: info@mindfuleating.org.uk
“Mindful eating is not a quick fix but has helped me explore and understand my relationship with food and helped me understand how small but consistent changes can help me take control of my diet.”
“This has been life changing, I feel so comfortable with my choices and feel like food no longer has a hold over me.”
“I was eating totally the wrong things before, leaving me hungry all the time and still putting on weight. I’ve now lost over a stone in 4 months. I emphasise that this is not a diet! This is about just making better decisions about food”.
“Emma suggested small (and often easy) adjustments to my daily habits to help me be more mindful of my eating and start to see food as a friend and not foe”.
“My mindful eating sessions with Emma have made a huge and lasting difference to how I feel about food and myself more generally. Emma is very easy to open up to and never judgemental.”
For full reviews from clients, click HERE.
My Other Services
Online workshop: ‘How To Beat Overeating For Good’.
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